Content Guidelines For High Search Engine Rankings

Introduction

This note lists a few guidelines for writing copy that will improve your
Web site's rankings in the search engines. You'll get the best results by
applying them fairly rigidly, but don't compromise the quality or the impact
of your message just to cram in another use of a keyword.

In general, each page of your site should be optimized for a single keyword
or phrase. Before you start editing text, assign each page a keyword, preferably
one that is already well represented on the page.

We've roughly ordered this list according to the importance of the element,
reflecting the current best guess in our continuing efforts to decipher
the ranking algorithms used by the search engines.

These guidelines often contradict copy writer's preferred practices; when
they do, we suggest a straightforward business approach to deciding whether
the increased traffic resulting from search engine optimization offsets
a decreased click-through rate (or some other performance measurement) caused
by awkward language.

Now our little disclaimer; we spend a lot of time gathering and analyzing
the statistics of keyword usage on sites with high search engine rankings,
so these guidelines are something more than a WAG.
However, since the search engines don't publish their ranking algorithms,
we could be wrong. Also, many other factors besides those included in these
guidelines effect a Web site's rankings. So, following these guidelines
will not assure high rankings; following them will, however, improve your
rankings.

NOTE: If you find your word processor inadequate for the painstaking word-counting
we seem to be recommending, Fookes Software publishes a dandy little shareware
text editor called NoteTab Light with
excellent tools for deriving word usage statistics and for stripping html
tags, among other things. We receive no compensation for this plug.

Word Count

Nothing particularly sneaky here—this really does just mean the number
of words on the page, but the count excludes all words inside html tags.
So, meta tags, alt text, comments and any text displayed as a graphical
element rather than as html body text does not count. Use a text or an html
editor to strip the tags before counting the words.

The average site ranked in the top 5 positions for a range of search terms
has around 300 words of body text; we recommend 250-500 words. The many
Web sites whose text consists of "re-purposed" brochure copy will typically
have less than half that, making this the most often violated guideline,
as well as the most important.

Keyword Frequency

This is simply the number of times the search term appears on the page,
regardless of the total number of words. If the term is a single word, just
count its occurrences. If it is a phrase, count the occurrence of each word
in the phrase (excluding stop words like, "and", "the", etc.) and use the
lowest number.

High ranking sites fall into a keyword frequency range of 5-11. We suggest
a frequency of 8-11, but don't use your keywords over 12 times on a page.
We have found that rankings drop precipitously with keyword frequency over
12.

It isn't necessary that each word in a keyword phrase is used exactly the
same number of times, but closer is better. Also, the exact phrase need
not repeat throughout the copy, as long as the words in the phrase are used
in proximity to each other.

Prominence

Keyword prominence has two aspects. The first is the use of the work in
Headings and bold or larger text and is addressed simply by employing your
keywords whenever you can within these elements. The second is a bit more
complicated, but probably more important. This aspect has to do with how
near the beginning of the text the keyword (or phrase) appears, and is generally
reported numerically.

As an example of sorts, consider the 10 word sequence "Apples blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." "Apples" has a prominence of 100%.
In the sequence "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Apples", its
prominence is 0%. If it were to be both the first and the last words of
this sequence, its prominence would be 50% (100% plus 0% divided by 2)—if
the first and second words, the prominence would be 95% (100% plus 90% divided
by 2).

You don't need to calculate your keyword prominence. Just be aware that
typical prominence for a high ranking page is around 65%, meaning that although
keywords appear throughout the copy, their use is weighted toward the beginning
of the body text. If you use your keywords twice as often in the first half
of your copy as you do in the second half, you will come close to matching
this statistic.

Link Text

These are the words used in your copy as hypertext links, like this: Go
to Top of Page. I've used "Top" as link text. Using keywords as hypertext
links will improve you rankings, and if the word links to a site other than
your own, will really help the recipient of the link.

If you are using text links as navigation features, make sure the text
supports your keywords. If you use graphical elements for navigation, try
to add text links somewhere on the page, either within the copy or as a
separate navigation feature.

Keyword Density

This means the percentage of the total words on the page constituted by
the keywords. A typical high-ranking page will have a keyword density of
around 3%, but we've found that paying attention to frequency and word count
guidelines will generally put you in the ball park for density, which doesn't
seem to be that important, anyway.

Alt Text

Alt text is the message that appears when you hover your cursor over an
image, when a graphical element is missing or if a browser has graphics
disabled. It looks like this:

Some evidence suggests keyword use in alt text can improve rankings slightly.
A more important reason to pay attention to this feature, however, is that
it provides the only message from your site's graphics that is available
to vision-impaired visitors who use software that vocalizes your text.